The big event of the day at Tory conference took place outside the conference centre and starred a non-Tory. Into Manchester Town Hall swaggered Nigel Farage, practically squelching with glee, and sporting that mischievous bug-eyed smirk that makes him look like a toad plotting a practical joke. A swarm of cameramen and journalists buzzed round him.

“I’m persona non grata!” he bragged, delightedly. He was late; everyone else, including senior Tory MPs, had been waiting 15 minutes to begin. No doubt he had a perfectly good excuse, and wasn’t merely showing them who was boss.

The event was about the EU; the speakers were the Ukip leader plus Tory Eurosceptic Bill Cash and the Telegraph’s Peter Oborne. As Mr Farage sauntered in, audience members cheered – throatily, aggressively, as if hailing a belt-winning boxer. A grey-haired man near the front kept springing out of his seat, as if it were too hot to sit on, and giving him the thumbs-up. “Persona non grata”? Personae don’t come much more grata than this. It was meant to be a Tory event, albeit a fringe one; instead it felt almost like a Ukip rally.

Mr Cash – tall and imposing, like an elderly wardrobe – spoke first. “I say to Nigel: lay off our marginal seats!” he cried. Probably it was meant to sound tough, but it came across more like pleading. Mr Farage chuckled indulgently.

Now it was his turn to speak. Instantly he tossed aside the blokey bonhomie as if it were a cigarette end. This was serious Farage, angry Farage, ranting and gesticulating like a real-ale Mussolini. Echoes boomed down from the high ceiling. “Listening to you this afternoon,” he barked at Mr Cash, “I’ve realised you’re a hopelessly out-of-date tribal politician!” Ecstatic applause from the Farage groupies. A Tory MP – Anne Main (St Albans) – walked out in disgust. Mr Cash turned up his palms in protest and smiled weakly. If this is how Mr Farage talks to the Tories’ sternest Eurosceptics, so much for an election pact in 2015.

David Cameron, Mr Farage went on, had “let us down like a cheap pair of braces”; the Tory leadership disdained Ukip as “members of the lower orders” (“They must be appalled that in the upper reaches of Ukip we have working-class people”); and there would be “no deal” between Ukip and the Tory party. Cheers from the balding groupies.

Not that everyone was on his side. “How are we going to get a referendum?” he asked rhetorically. “Vote Tory!” yelled a heckler. Mr Farage, funnily enough, disagreed: he predicted that after 2015 Ukip would have enough MPs “to hold the balance of power” in Westminster.

After the speeches came a Q&A session. Time for a right-of-reply from Mr Cash. “You,” he told Mr Farage, “are living in Cloud Cuckoo Land!”

I half-expected him to add, “Welcome to the neighbourhood! Do pop round if you need to borrow some sugar!” But disappointingly he didn’t.